SR0334 104TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

SR0334 LRB104 13745 LAW 26482 r

SENATE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, The Racial Equity Rapid Response Team (RERRT) was formed at the request of the City of Chicago Mayor's Office under the leadership of Mayor Lori Lightfoot in March 2020; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT was co-convened by West Side United, an organization consisting of a collaboration of hospital partners, including Ascension Illinois, Cook County Health, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, the Rush University Medical Center, the Sinai Health System, and the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT was established in order to mitigate a data-driven response to the high rates of COVID-19 mortality and to save lives and lessen further harm to Black and Latinx communities; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT formed coalitions between government agencies, health care providers, and community organizations to identify needs and disparities by gathering community insight, to advocate for resources, and to champion reliable data and information in order to better promote healthy behavior; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT partnered with 21 health care providers to proactively contact patients in communities that were most impacted by COVID-19, connecting with approximately 75,000 patients; of those who provided race/ethnicity information, 48% self-identified as Black and 40% self-identified as Latinx; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT consisted of several key local partners, including the City of Chicago Mayor's Office, the Chicago Department of Public Health, West Side United, the Civic Consulting Alliance, the Rush University Medical Center, the Sinai Urban Health Institute, the University of Chicago, Advocate Health, the University of Illinois Chicago, Austin Coming Together, the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation, South Shore Works, Enlace, Latinos Progresando, the Northwest Side Housing Center, ChiByDesign, the Southwest Organizing Project, the Chicago COVID Response Fund, and the Oprah Winfrey Charitable Foundation; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT, in partnership with the Civic Consulting Alliance, facilitated collaboration between health care providers, which culminated in an unprecedented joint statement being released in June 2020, in which 40 institutions spoke in a unified voice to declare racism a public health crisis and pledge collective action to improve health equity; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT worked to ensure testing sites were in historically underserved communities, resulting in eight testing sites in RERRT target locations and mobile testing sites, which made testing more accessible to these communities; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT, in partnership with local and national philanthropic organizations, secured financial support for those most impacted by COVID-19, including $3.1 million in grants secured by partners, $155,000 in rent assistance, and cash assistance in the amount of $120,000 for 120 individuals ineligible for federal stimulus dollars; and

WHEREAS, Within the first two months of its launch, the RERRT distributed critical resources to communities, including 130,000 masks and 13,000-plus meals, reaching 8,000 households and more than 2,000 seniors; the team also enabled public access to COVID-19 data by way of a Slalom dashboard that provided testing, case, and death rates by race/ethnicity and at the zip code-level, thereby establishing Chicago as a national leader in data transparency; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT further commissioned the Driving Equitable Resource Distribution report, which was compiled by ChiByDesign, proposing five strategies and 14 guiding principles to ensure cross collaboration between businesses, governments, and philanthropic organizations; and

WHEREAS, The work of the RERRT evolved to focus on vaccine equity through the creation of Protect Chicago Plus, a plan based at the Chicago Department of Public Health and designed to provide consistent access to vaccines for Chicagoans, especially those in low vaccinated areas, to make vaccines available where people live, work, and play, and to focus energy and resources on the lowest vaccinated communities; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT inspired the creation of six Healthy Chicago Zones (HCZ), a network of hyper-local partnerships established to achieve the Healthy Chicago goal of closing Chicago's racial life expectancy gap, ensuring that community members have the power and resources to identify local assets and develop solutions that meet their most pressing health needs; and

WHEREAS, The RERRT ultimately became a model worth replicating in other cities, including New York City, which was struggling to address inequitable health outcomes, including COVID-19 and beyond, and the systemic issues that underpin them; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE ONE HUNDRED FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we declare June 5, 2025 as Racial Equity Rapid Response Team Day in the State of Illinois in recognition of the efforts of the Racial Equity Rapid Response Team (RERRT).